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In 2015, Google set out to improve cities everywhere by launching Sidewalk Labs, a smart city and urban design consultancy. The company announced its first major project in 2017: the creation of the Quayside district in Toronto, a futuristic neighborhood that seamlessly integrates the digital and the physical. In June of 2019, Sidewalk’s master plan was released, eliciting a barrage of controversy around privacy and participation. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association initiated a lawsuit against local, provincial and federal government over data privacy concerns. Vice called the proposal a “democracy grenade.” More recently, members of an independent panel of academics, activists and business leaders said that the Sidewalk Labs plan was “frustratingly abstract” and “did not appear to put the citizen at the centre of the design process for digital innovations,” calling the proposal “tech for tech’s sake.”

It’s true that many cities need to embrace more innovative technological infrastructure to augment aging physical systems, but the physical and technological must incorporate the social. The social infrastructure of a city is perhaps its most important component. It’s the component for which all others exist and the component without which nothing would exist. The world’s leading cities are not built “from the internet up,” as Sidewalk Labs seems to think. They’re built from people up.

The plan starts out by saying all the right things. It notes the thousands of Toronto residents who were interviewed or surveyed, many of whom envisioned a city that was safer, cleaner, more efficient, more affordable, more engaged—a place for all to call home. In the three volumes of the plan that follow, however, the authors focus primarily on technological solutions to these issues. Many of their tech-oriented ideas are indeed compelling, but they largely ignore the social and cultural factors that make great cities great.

A keyword search of the plan illuminates the implicit bias of Sidewalk Labs’ approach (see Figure 1). Terms such as “innovation,” “data” and “digital” are mentioned repeatedly, but others such as “social,” “culture,” and “human” are relatively scarce. Self-driving cars are mentioned more than social infrastructure. Some words that one might expect to see used heavily in an urban planning report, such as “citizen,” are barely mentioned at all.

Admittedly, this keyword analysis is unfair to Sidewalk Labs. They do discuss public spaces, civic life, and neighborhood dynamics. That said, I think it does fairly demonstrate the imbalance inherent to the plan, for which it has already been widely criticized. The city Sidewalk Labs imagines puts innovation and technology first, culture and citizens second.

Indeed, a closer reading of the plan reinforces the theory that its authors were attempting to design a product rather than a community. In Volume 1, Sidewalk Labs describes its approach as “providing the physical, digital, and policy conditions for innovation on which an array of third parties can build and explore new solutions to urban challenges, with the goal of achieving long-term quality-of-life goals. To catalyze this approach,” the authors continue, “Sidewalk Labs identified the building blocks of a neighbourhood — mobility, public realm, buildings and housing, and sustainability — and explored how urban innovations within these areas could support a new kind of community and infuse flexibility into the built environment.”

There are a number of concerning premises contained in this statement. First, while addressing physical, digital and legal conditions are vital to catalyzing urban innovation, none of these ingredients matter unless the social conditions of a community are addressed. Second, leaving it up to third parties to determine what spaces are ultimately used for sounds democratic at first, but how can one know what physical or digital infrastructure is necessary without a specific audience in mind? This is why planned neighborhoods, especially in the United States, often end up feeling like clones. Many developers design the buildings first and worry about who will populate them second, rather than designing the buildings around the local population or the intended users. Third, not viewing social infrastructure as one of the “building blocks” of neighborhoods is either an egregious oversight or an ignorant omission. It’s the social, cultural and human aspects of communities that make them dynamic and desirable. Fourth, Sidewalk Labs claims its urban innovations could support a new kind of community, but they fail to define what kind. This is why the plan has accused of being tech for tech’s sake—it largely fails to define who it’s for. Yes, it’s for people of Toronto, but no city’s population is a monolith. Instead of taking a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality, Sidewalk Labs should have aligned its ideas with specific social and cultural objectives.

Although the Sidewalk Labs team has an accomplished roster of design thinking specialists, it’s clear that their mission was to design physical and technological infrastructure for generic users, not the diverse array of human beings that make great cities great.

The plan does note that “No community is complete without a cross-cutting layer of social infrastructure,” a phrase the plan re-uses verbatim a number of times. This acknowledgement, however, further demonstrates Sidewalk Labs’ bias. Social infrastructure is not a cross-cutting layer. It’s the foundational layer, the layer that creates the conditions for the human interactions that make cities interesting, inspiring and dare I say innovative.

Later in Volume 1, social infrastructure is actually included in a list of “key areas” that define the plan’s overall approach. The other areas, as mentioned above, are mobility, public realm, buildings and housing, sustainability, digital innovation. Volume 1 devotes a single page (page 45) to social infrastructure, noting on page 39 that additional details can be found in Volume 2. In Volume 2, however, all of the other key areas are given their own chapters except for social infrastructure, which is pushed into the background. “Given its intricate ties to a specific place,” the plan notes on page 19 of Volume 2, “social infrastructure is explored in greater detail in...Volume 1.” Volume 1 points us to Volume 2 for details on social infrastructure. Volume 2 points us back to Volume 1. This circular reference leaves social infrastructure with only one page in a 1,500-page plan. The plan is right that social infrastructure has intricate ties to place, but the order of operations should be reversed. Place should have intricate ties to social needs. They should be built around people’s behavior and in response to social needs and cultural values rather than trying to conform people’s behavior to the physical or technological environment.

The social innovations that the plan does propose include a Care Collective space for care delivery and education, a Civic Assembly space for community programming, an elementary school, distributed library locations, an employment program for connecting businesses and job seekers and an online platform to co-create public space programming. These proposals are fantastic. Unfortunately, they amount to little more than fragmented initiatives that allow the plan to check some boxes. There’s no theory of change, no cultural framework, no social vision uniting these ideas or lending credence to their efficacy. They’re there, but fail to create a social environment greater than the sum of the parts.

The plan also does an excellent job of outlining what is likely the future of all commercial space: flexible, multi-purpose spaces that go beyond mixed-use to multi-use, spaces with many functions rather than adjacent spaces with specific ones. It discusses cutting-edge approaches to street design that create more and more flexible public space that can adapt to different demands at different times of day. Such ideas, while not entirely novel, are desperately needed in cities around the world. The plan should have spent as much time discussing them and their impact on community and culture as it did autonomous vehicles and data collection. Instead, the plan reads like its social innovations were an afterthought, human necessities imposed on an otherwise perfect technological utopia.

In a world of increasing division and inequality, the urban vision we need is one that is less techno-centric and more anthropocentric. The urban utopia, if even possible, won’t be created by integrating the physical and the digital. It will be created by using both to support the people, the citizens, the neighbors, the humans that make cities amazing places to work and live. As celebrated urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote in a 1958 Fortunearticle, “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”

Remington Tonar is a strategy and innovation consultant who has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 500s to fast-growing startups. He is currently the Chief

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Remington Tonar is a strategy and innovation consultant who has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 500s to fast-growing startups. He is currently the Chief Revenue Officer of The Cannon, one of the largest innovation services providers in Texas. Ellis Talton is the Director of Growth at Briq, a construction and development data company. He previously served as the Director of Development for a telecom provider to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and was an energy journalist in the Middle East and Africa. Remington and Ellis are the founders of StateOf, a platform created to help leaders understand the state of infrastructure and their role in shaping its future.